July 6, 2007

So not that much has happened in the past week. So I feel like I was struggling a lot in work. I wasn't struggling because I had no idea what I was doing, but more like I was struggling because I had to learn a lot about programming language to understand what the heck I was doing so that I could learn the programs I was using. Well on that note, I basically was donig protein folds this whole week. I had to restart my folding at least 3 times, because I learned something new about the program. And to top it off, I was about finished every single time right before I had to restart. Now let's see why I had to restart sometimes. First, I realized that the basic way to fold the proteins as I looked in the tutorial was actually not that accurate compared to when I use more than one template protein to fold the other proteins. Next, I had to start over since I needed to make more candidates for protein folding for more accurate results. Finally, I had to restart because I realized that the built-in alignment in the Modeller program was not working correctly and messed everything up. So I had to start-over again. Oh, and to make things brighter, I spent like three days trying to install the program that I needed onto the servers. And I still have not finished installing some programs on their servers since I still have some errors.I've been pretty busy with work, more like obsessive. Sometimes I feel like I'm a workaholic.

Anyways, I haven't done much to explore China. I've been eating a lot of food in my nearby area. I had Korean food that was pretty good. I had rabbit at the lab dinner. Yesterday, I went to a really expensive peking duck place. It's supposedly one of the best out there. I spent about $50 us dollars. So I got some peking duck that cost about 60 RMB. We got to pick which duck we wanted from the kitchen. I think that we were getting some special treatment. We were served supposedly the best pieces of the duck. I got the duck brain. It was quite interesting I thought. A lot like liver I think. I think most people would get grossed out, but I find that when you don't think, that's best. The extra pieces of the whole peking duck were used to make a really good duck stew. got supposedly one of the best shark fin soup in the world for about 281 RMB per indvidual bowl. Got some really crazy good eel barbecue. Got turtle soup. When I saw this on the menu, I had to get this. It was pretty dang good. And the meal included free desserts with some ice shaving pudding, and fruits which were really good. The fruit dish had some dry ice underneath that gave it a cool look. So overall, it was really good. The place was really Western and expensive, but good. Here's a link for the pictures.

So today, I finally finished my protein folding! I'm so happy. After two weeks of work, it's all done! haha. Anyways, so now I have to start figuring out how to run the NAMD simulations. And that's going to take awhile since I also need to find a lot of server power to run them. Anyways, so after that today, I went to play badminton with the people in my lab. Wow, I completely forgot how to play badminton. I mean, I haven't played badminton for I think 6 years now, which is a pretty long time I think. Too make things short, they were super good, and I got creamed. But it was fun still. Then we went to get dinner that was paid for, which I say is really good.