house or home?

finally, thanks to mal's initiative, this house is a home! she got ash, vip n arul to sort out the living room, and it looks awesome now. they even got the chandelier up, and changed the main carpet too. hoppefully we'll get her started on the kitchen next time she's seized by the decorating bug.

got the extra speakers from vip's music system hooked up to mine. they come with extra-long wire too, so i have some kick-ass surround system in my room, with 5 speakers strategically placed around the room. anyone remember RK C-313? this would knock its socks off!!

convinced the nice people at NYE Lubricants that my need for the NYE Q oil was genuine, and that i was really a poor grad student.. they offered to send me a 1 oz. bottle of the stuff free, which suits my thesis work just fine!! talking of which, things are going well with the research. i'll quickly run through what it entails.

i'm going to cut/paint/etch a channel on a flat germanium prism, and run biological fluid through it, basically just different water samples but eventually saline with fibrinogen in it. fibrinogen is what causes clotting in blood. so for different flow rates and patterns, i'm gonna be monitoring the amount of biofilm (scum) formation on the germanium using infra-red microscopy. i'll also be trying different methods of surface treatment, mainly glow-discharge treatment. the eventual objective being finding the optimum flow path and surface quality that will allow minimum biofilm formation. failing that i can at least set up a cleaning regime by getting an approximate time frame for the amount of biofouling that would hamper flow in the channel.

for those asking what or where this could be applied, all fluid delivery media are affected by biofouling. the longer we can delay this process the better our flow properties. microdosing drug delivery systems, lab-on-a-chip testers, dialysis machine interfaces, transfusion surfaces are all potential applications for this.

it does help that my advisor dr. baier thinks i'm the bees knees as far as all this is concerned! when i met him after the RSF reunion weekend with some rough ideas, he was so impressed that he went to the extent of complimenting me on my sincerity to the project, since he was so sure that i had spent all weekend working on the drafts etc.!! i don't mind him thinking that way at all!! ;-))