Into summer

I moved into a new apartment, with my old roommate Bob and his best friend Kyle. It seems like a good setup so far. It's a really nice place in the Richmond district - all hardwood floors, a fireplace, lots of space, half a block from Golden Gate Park and a little over a mile from the ocean. I've been running outside again, on trails! I'd forgotten how much I miss that. We got a good deal on the place, too. (God bless rent control...)

I took a week off (which was not really relaxing at all, due to the move and to several other factors), and picked my summer lab rotation: I'll be working in a synthetic biology lab that does work on 4th-generation biofuel production. The PI outlined my project description with me on Thursday. I had explained to him that I had a background in physics, and that was where my real technical interests lay, so he proposed I work on building a dynamic model connecting the current guess-and-check transfer functions of the quorum-sensing bacterial NOR logic gates with the statistical physics-based RBS (ribosome binding site) calculator. Both the logic gates and the RBS calculator are already developed; my job is to connect the two with a kinetic mathematical model. I'm doing some reading on signal processing at the moment, trying to come up with a general strategy. I'm excited about this, though; this is the sort of work I consider myself good at, so I'm hopeful that I can create something genuinely useful here. The big picture of this is that if I can assemble a good kinetic framework for transfer function prediction that goes back to the statistical mechanics of ribosome-DNA binding, this will allow more efficient, logical genetic circuit design, which will help streamline the biofuel production work.

I've decided to sell my car and buy a motorcycle. (Right now I am negotiating with a guy down in the south bay for an almost-new Suzuki DR650, which is pretty much my ideal on-road/off-road bike.) I miss my old Nighthawk S from college, and owning a car in San Francisco just isn't practical. Plus, with gas prices the way they are, I think I can get a good deal for my Civic. With any luck, I should have a significant chunk of money left over, too, which, along with my savings, should give me enough to complete my private pilot's license and still have some money set aside for a rainy day. I looked into pilot training, and as far as I can tell, it looks like it'll either my San Mateo or (more likely) San Carlos airport. I'm really looking forward to starting. Feels like I've been saving up for this forever, and I'm excited about finally getting to work on it!