Sophie's Socks and Stuff

... Is the departmental annual lecture and dinner. This year the talk sounded quite dull but the speaker, Prof Carol Robinson was really, really excellent. She explained her work going from the very, very early days of mass spectrometry and the general principals to how it is now possible to get information about the assembly of really, really huge protein complexes. Sounds dull but it really caught everyone's attention for the full hour. Unfortunately the president of the leeds biochem soc is a total patronising twat and gave the longest, awful, patronising introduction ever.

The annual dinner was really great. I think I looked quite gorgeous in my outfit and hair and make up. Unfortunately I got totally pissed at the dinner (my table won loads of wine in the raffle and I was determined to get my money's worth from my ticket) and the evening degenerated into painting people with bright red lipstick! It was a top night and the university dance band were pricey and the dancefloor was tiny but they sounded great, especially the girl singer and they did a wicked cover of King of the swingers song from the jungle book.

I'm a bit tiddly but so much to do. Need to head into town to pick up train tickets, get hollywood movie star red lippie, go home, sober up, make my whole self look totally stunningly beautiful and head out by 7pm for the departmental annual dinner. I feel exhausted just thinking about everything I have to do.

I'm getting quite excited now about my imminent return to Norwich to visit my sister and dance like a loon for the annual university folk dance festival (IVFDF). I'm not that big into the folk scene and quite a lot of overly folky people are twats but I do love an evening of skipping about a room and being twirled around and around. It's hard work but way more fun than going to a gym. On the saturday I will be into full on morris mode. It really is the most fun dancing I've ever done and pretty much all the morris dancers I've ever met have been really sound, cool people. I still think it's a shame traditional English/British things get such a lot of stick. I might write more on that topic if I remember but now I have to nip off for the departmental annual lecture. Mass spec of proteins. what fun!

I quite liked this thing I was emailed by a friend.

Women are like apples on trees. The best ones are at the top of the tree. Most men don't want to reach for the good ones because they are afraid of falling and getting hurt. Instead, they just take the rotten apples from the ground that aren't as good, but easy. The apples at the top think something is wrong with them, when in reality, they're amazing. They just have to wait for the right man to come along, the one who's brave enough to climb all the way to the top of the tree. Share this with other women who are good apples, even those who have already been picked!! Now Men . . . . Men are like a fine wine. They begin as grapes, and it's up to women to stomp the crap out of them until they turn into something acceptable to have dinner with.

Today I asked a colleague to get me some assorted highlighter pens when he went down to stores. He got me OHP pens instead. I don't think highlighting papers with a black OHP pen is really going to be a good idea. I really should stop being such an almighty lazy arse as it seems if you want a job doing properly you have to do it yourself.

I dunno what's wrong with me but this morning I had absolutely no patience for anyone or anything. Lab work is going badly and is very, very frustrating. Theoretically everything I have done should have fixed the problem but it's still not working. Grrrr. Anyway I popped into town for a large mug of coffee and a large bun and managed to skim read a couple of journal articles that look quite interesting for a lab meeting tomorrow and I had a lovely sticky bun as well which has mellowed me out quite considerably.

Argh. Why can't people organise themselves better. The joy of a quiet pint after work is somewhat spoilt when you have to hang around an extra hour and a half (and on a friday of all days) to wait for fellow drinkers to finish work so you have someone to drink with.

It's what I love to do.

I've already had a capirina in the office and I'm off to the pub after work for a couple of drinks and then maybe off out to star or maybe not. I like most forms of alcohol as long as it's not cheap and nasty value brands. These days I mostly drink Amstel or other lagers and if I ever get to go to a proper pub I love to have a proper pint of bitter. My favourites are Adnams broadside (I can't believe I drank so much of it without realising it was quite so strong) and Youngs special. Youngs winter warmer is one of my favourite festive drinks as well. I quite like wine, especially with a meal. On valentines day we had a particularly delicious bottle of Tokay. Mmm. I'm quite partial to dry wines from Alsace in France but that's possibly because while most children are brought up on ribena and cola, I was being given small glasses of lovely french wine. So anyway I like lots of french wines, recently I've being drinking quite a lot of Vouvrey. I can't stand the flat, dessicatingly dry Australian wines. They make my mouth feel like a shrivelled up horrible thing after a bottle (hmmm maybe the problem is in the quantity not the actual quality). I also love spirits as long as they come with a mixer. On warm summer evenings there's nothing better than to sit on a patio sipping gin and tonics. Mmmmmm.

It's a bit of a long and tortuous road but I thought I'd tell you how I ended up in my current PhD.

Like every other PhD student I did an undergraduate degree, I did biochemistry at a small but friendly pretty OK university. I pottered along and was quite rubbish until I realised there was quite a real risk of coming out with a useless, low grade pass if I didn't pull my socks up. I pulled my socks right up and in my final year I decided that I really did love pottering about and doing research in the lab and it was something I was really really good at (not something that I'm used to). Anyway I thought the way to get a good job pottering about and doing lab research was to do a PhD. So I applied to a really excellent lab in a top notch research institute and waited for a response. I was pretty certain I'd at least get an interview as I had worked there in the summer holidays and got on well with everyone. I got bored of waiting and telephoned to find out why I hadn't heard anything. It turned out that my tutors at university hadn't bothered writing or posting the references to go with the application form. I was so angry that I'd missed out on such a great opportunity due to their incompetance. I was even more gutted when I found out they would have loved to have had me do the PhD with them at the top notch research institute.

After that I had a think and applied to lots of random universities for PhDs and a couple of MRes courses. I got offered a few interesting projects but once I found out I'd got funding I chose to do the MRes course. It turned out to be possibly one of the best years ever. I met my mostly lovely boyfriend, got loads of excellent research experiance and got loads of satisfaction from doing so much interesting research and time to rethink doing a PhD. It turned out that the PhD I really wanted to do at the top notch research institute the previous year had been readvertised so I immediately got in touch with the project leader and got the phd without interview or anything.

Anyway I started this PhD at the top notch place and it was pretty poor. The group just didn't seem motivated or particularly interested in the work. All the people I worked with were highly skilled technicians rather than researchers. To them it was just a job, arrive at 8am, coffee at about 10am, lunch and cryptic crossword at 12 then home at 4pm. Everyone did their own thing and they were so dull. I didn't enjoy it so I decided to sneakily apply for PhDs at other universities. I ended up having a heap of interviews at a university near my boyfriend and ended up taking the least interesting sounding project because at least all the people in the lab seemed friendly and I would get to see my new supervisor.

So I've been doing this PhD for 2 and a bit years now (eek I really should get motivated to finish but it's so scary, I've been a student so long, I think I need rehabilitating out into the real world). The work I've actually ended up doing is surface chemistry, electrochemistry and generally hard science, I've actually given up on the stuff I wanted to do when I first started this PhD. Thinking about it all it's really great and I've ended up in a field I've always been interested in but didn't think I could do (I always kept away from physics, electrical engineering and general hard science). Now I'm trying to make a novel medical diagnostic and on the whole it's been pretty successful, I've even got my first ever research paper accepted.

The moral of this story, to me at least, is don't give up, try as hard as you can, don't put up with people being shit and second rate, give anything a go, you never know where it might end.

Phew. That was far too long.

My aunt is an amazing woman. I love her lots. I don't really want to say why but I wanted to say that she's really, really great.

Diffusion at electrodes can create an impedance called Warburg Impedance. This impedance depends on the frequency of the potential perturbation. At high frequencies the Warburg impedance is small since diffusing reactants don't have to move very far. At low frequencies the reactants have to diffuse further, increasing the Warburg impedance.

Q = zmF

Where z = number of electrons, m = number of moles (not the little furry creatures unfortunately), F = Faraday's constant, 96500 coulombs/mole, Q = amount of charge.

Someone gave me this link on another internet site and it's certainly thought provoking. If everyone lived like me we would need 1.3 planets!

Oh dear. I just can't be arsed with anything still. Sometimes I think having a blog is not such a good idea after all. I'm certainly not witty or entertaining, I just seem to expose my worst, self indulgent, whinging, moaning and dull traits. I think I can be quite entertaining and nice but I just never really have any friends. I don't really see the point in being nice to people if they won't reciprocate or whatever. I'd say I'm quite a friendly, approachable person, if I go to a conference or new place on my own I'll go up and chat to other people and stuff but I can't sustain things. It sometimes seems quite a worthless effort to be smiley, happy and vibrant or whatever. Often if I'm out with people and am feeling quite neutral people think I'm totally depressed and miserable and I have to make an effort to be smiley again or people think I'm specifically pissed off with them and won't speak to me or whatever. I'm just feeling so totally crap at the moment, my skin is bad and I feel fat and yukky but can't really be bothered and I don't know what to do about it. I'm still really anxious about getting the phd done as well. I keep thinking that my money will run out soon and there is still so much to do but I'm not getting it done. In a way I think I'm quite scared, I know it will be one of the hardest most stressful things I do, certainly in my professional life and I'm terrified about the viva I will have at the end of it. I suppose by not doing it I'm keeping things the way they are now, not great but not getting worse (or better but that always seems like quite an unlikely prospect). There's so much to do and think about I just keep getting overwhelmed and not able to do anything.