Wayne and Erika Pfeiler

Since basketball is about as big around here as football in Tennessee, we had to experience it first-hand. Both the BME students and Food Science club got block seating for the NCSU/UNC game at the RBC Center on Wed, Feb 22. Erika and I got tickets with the BME group, but we showed love for the Food Science club by attending the pre-game at Tri's place.

Technically the BME program I'm in is joint between UNC and NCSU, but since I'm always at State I wore red to the game. Judging by the colors of almost eveyone else around me, I made the right choice. It was fun, although UNC won in the end.

We sat very close to the celing in the arena. You can check out the view from our seats. The people dressed like "Where's Waldo" on the bottom left of the court are the NCSU Band members. The dance team did a half-time show, and some man tried to shoot baskets from around the court to win money. Bless him, he was old and only made one layup shot after many attempts.

Thanks to Carla for these pictures, we left the camera at home.

Posted by Wayne at 01:46 PM | Permalink

So today I saw these chalked all over the NCSU campus. No other message, just "Don't Worry - Be happy!" with a smiley face. As you can see, this one was placed on the side of a dumpster, which is close to my building. Others were on buildings, sidewalks, walls, streets, pretty much everywhere.

Was it national be happy day or something? It's a long time since 1988 when Bobby McFerrin had the hit song, so I'm guessing there's some other significance. It'd be a catchy way to advertise some campus event, but I'd expect some other message to accompany it, or at least a location and date or something.

Weird. Does anybody else have a clue?

Posted by Wayne at 05:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Wednesday we went to the Carolina Ale House in Cary for the Biomedical Engineering holiday party. It was fun, and lots of people showed up. Being in a joint BME program, there are lots of people I rarely ever see who spend most of their time on the other campus in Chapel Hill. So it was good to see some of the other folks from over there.

Posted by Wayne at 11:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Yes. The semester is over. No more classes for almost a month. Grades are starting to roll in, and so far we've done well. Being in grad school basically means we don't get to skip town just yet. We're expected to be around another week and a half to get some work in. But the end of classes means I probably won't have to stay up until crazy hours finishing projects and studying.

Posted by Wayne at 02:17 PM | Permalink

Quick exam week update.
Erika is done - Lucky!
I have one final tomorrow, one medium-sized paper due Friday, and a HUGE paper due Friday also. The huge paper is for my advisor, so I've actually been working on it for some time now. Cross your fingers for me.

Posted by Wayne at 04:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

This is the last week of classes. Next week we have exams. Everything in the world comes due right about now each semester. Suddenly about 2 or 3 assignments or tests make up 56% of your final grade. Man, it's stressful. Grad school is especially bad, since we have to worry about keeping our GPA high enough, and any course grade below a B- means we have to re-take the course. Hopefully we'll be fine this semester, and I think we will be. I can't wait for a break where I don't have any deadlines looming over my head. That'll be a good day.

Posted by Wayne at 02:23 PM | Permalink

A couple weeks ago we went to see Jorge Cham give a short talk on campus. He draws an online comic strip - PhD (Piled Higher and Deeper) - that jokes about life as a grad student. PhD is pretty good, and you should all check it out: http://www.phdcomics.com/.

Posted by Wayne at 04:29 PM | Permalink

I've been super swamped at work lately. I have a deadline Monday next week, and I've been doing everything I can to meet it. Erika's been busy too, she has a big paper due Wednesday for a class. Not much fun right now, but I guess we'll enjoy it when we're done.

On a lighter note, we're going to see the Julius Caesar play this weekend in Raleigh. Plays are nice, but I think I'll appreciate it even more since being there will mean I won't be working on this project - at least for a couple hours.

Posted by Wayne at 10:16 PM | Permalink

I've been mad-busy most of last week and this Monday finishing up an abstract for ORS. But it's submitted, so hopefully by the end of November they'll let me know if they want me to come to New Orleans to present a poster on my work.

Classes started last Wednesday too, and they seem okay so far. I'm taking a biotechnology lab course, and I'm really looking forward to it. It should be totally different from work I've done before, and the material seems pretty cool. Biotechnology can be thought of as genetic engineering. But don't get excited just yet, the fanciest thing we'll do in this class is play with bacteria. Still, it's pretty cool.

Posted by Wayne at 12:11 PM | Permalink

Tomorrow starts another semester of grad school for Erika and me. We're less than thrilled about the prospect of exams, homework, and lots of studying (all while we're also doing research and writing papers). But thankfully, we won't have too many more classes to take. This time we're each taking one or two "real" classes and then a few one-hour courses to fill requirements. Generally fewer hours means easier classes, but not always.

I've been scrambling to finish an abstract for yet another deadline coming up soon. I think Erika's lab is mostly unpacked, so they can enjoy and start to use their new facilities in Schaub Hall.

Ask Erika about what they had to put up with in the Flex building sometime... We've both noticed that the school's policy of taking the lowest bidding contractor doesn't work out so well. Imagine a contractor who thinks an autoclave should drain into normal PVC pipe, or a contractor who says he can set up a cell culture clean room (but doesn't know what a clean room is). That's just the sort of things we've noticed. At least it's good for a laugh.

Posted by Wayne at 11:45 PM | Permalink

Since we're done with classes, we've been working on research more now. Erika is doing her first committee meeting and presentation today. What that means is she's showing her PhD committee what research she's done so far, and what she intends to work on next.
I went to a real-time PCR training meeting this morning, and later on I'll be getting ready for my mechanical experiments with strain gages. Strain gages are pretty neat. The simple explaination is they're small rectangles with wires attached that help to measure how much something solid stretches when it is bent.

Posted by Wayne at 11:18 AM | Permalink

Finally, yesterday I took my last exam, a grueling 4-hour long Physiology test. After that I took the rest of the day off to recover. Erika's grades have all come in, and she did very well. I'm still waiting on my grades from Tissues and Physiology.

So now it's the summer, no classes, no tests. It's very nice. so what does that mean for us? Basically, we'll spend about 40 hours a week working on our graduate research. Hopefully we'll get much more done now, working without the hinderance of classes, studying, and homework.

At least the weekends can be mostly relaxing now :)

Posted by Wayne at 11:40 AM | Permalink

I'm told that 4,000 Mexican soldiers smashed the French and traitor Mexican army of 8,000 at Puebla, Mexico, 100 miles east of Mexico City on the morning of May 5, 1862. Cinco de Mayo History What's that mean for us? Basically, we go have a beer with our friends.

Anyway, an update on us: We're in the middle of exam week. We've each finished with two of our classes, and have one more exam to take. Erika's lsat test is tomorrow morning, and mine is Tuesday morning. Wish us both luck.
Tomorrow evening, we're going to see Hitchhiker's Guide... It looks like fun, and Erika's been excited about it for a while. Yes, she's read the whole first book, and no, I haven't read any of it. I'm sure I can still enjoy it though. Maybe I'll read the book later, I'll put it on Wayne's book list.

Posted by Wayne at 02:58 PM | Permalink

We were lucky. The library only charged us $35 per book ($70 total) to do the restoration. Also, it shouldn't have any negative impact on our borrowing privilages.

Now Erika and I are working on end-of-the-semester papers, projects, presentations, take-home tests, and of course studying for finals. I think I'll be up pretty late tonight working on one. Why does the end of the semester have to be so depressing?

Posted by Wayne at 12:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Erika and I've been spending a lot of time studying for classes lately. We each have exams this week, and several large class projects are coming due soon. Only 2 more weeks of classes left, and then a week and a half or so of exams. And of course the weather is getting really nice, so that makes it all the harder to stick to the books. We can't wait for the semester to be over.

Posted by Wayne at 02:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

So our new office in Burlington is proving to have even more annyoying 'features'. The feature of the day was more like a lack of a feature, namely ELECTRICITY! One would imagine that keeping electricity running to an office room would make sense, but no, not at NCSU. I think the construction workers must have needed to turn off a circuit do do some work, but it would have been nice if we'd known about it ahead of time.
We came in this morning and found no electricity. Apparently the power had been off since 5:14am. Finally, around 11:00 it came back on, and we're happy. We set the clocks, and do start to do some work. Then, an hour later, it goes off again with no warning. This is very frustrating, since I was working on a desktop computer with no UPS.
Luckily, I had my new laptop with me, so I did some work for two hours until my battery was drained. Maybe they'll have it fixed by Monday...

Posted by Wayne at 04:29 PM | Permalink