skating on a sunday

So, on Sunday I met Mhairi for doing some exercise in skating. We went to Kangoroo Point along the river. We had a lot of fun, coke, icecream and beer! I tried the first time XXXX, a famous beer here in Australia. It is not too bad. It was a nice girl-afternoon.

Me resting under a palm tree

Mhairi in front of Brisbane's skyline

One of the oldest buildings in Brisbane

redcliffe

I went with Martina on Saturday to Redcliffe. This region is located north of Brisbane. You can see the Moreton Island from there. The first settlers arrived here in 1824 and started to build houses and farms. We did a long walk along the coast, it was hot and we got sunburnt! The region is not really interesting, cause the beach is full of stones. There are no waves like at sunshine coast or gold coast and the water is not clear. We spoke to a native on the beach and he told us, it is caused of the Moreton Island. Here some pics:

Martina taking one of the hundreds pics

Pelican observing us

A boat sceleton, used normally to bring more fish in the bay

A nice view over a small part of the beach

The real red cliffes

So, after three weeks I have to move already to another office. Lynn, my supervisor, is coming back on monday. I was using her desk so far and now I have to vacate the place. I had quite a lot of fun in the office with Mhairi and Ken. I will go now to my actually group members, Shane, Kelly and Melissa. It is a bit colder over there. As you can see, I was wearing socks already here.
What did I do so far? This week I was more or less the guinea pig for the high-throughput tools of Melissa and Shane. We had some problems with the machines. No wonder, if we need 20GB memory. But at the end we made it! Now I have a lot of data to put in the database. Next week I think I will go for more data hunting. We need more links to other databases and information about alternative splicing. So far we have the data of domain architecture from Pfam and SCOP and the membrane organisation of 39.299 human proteins.

Ok, my weekend is fully booked again! Tomorrow a (hopefully) nice trip to Redcliffe with Matte. And on sunday skating with Mhairi! Looking forward to it!

Sun, Sea, sunburnt

I thought I'd cancel this trip, cause of the headache, but today I took the hat with me! I took the train from Toowong to Landsborough in the north of brisbane. And then the bus to Caloundra at the Sunshine Coast. The names is just perfect! Have a look at some pics I took:



I spend some couples of hours on the Kings Beach and on Bulcock Beach. It was a great day and I am sure that I will come back.

Lone Pine

My office mates invited me to a trip to Lone Pine in the south of Brisbane. What a nice day! 30 degrees, sun and fun. Maybe I should first introduce you to my current office mates.

That are Mairhi and Ken. Mairhi actually worked at the Sanger centre in Cambridge (UK) before she moved with her boyfriend to Aussieland. What a small world!
We arrived at Lone Pine quite early (9am == too early). But it was a good time to avoid all the tourists. The first animals we woke up were little Emu chicks. Quite cute, but already able to steal rings and glasses!

After this we found sleepy but hungry kangaroos.The are soooo sweet! Here some impressions:



This knew exactly where to find the food, in the bag!

Here they are, the most cute animals on earth: Koalas! Not soo exciting, to be honest!


I liked the Wombats. They are lazy as well, but they enjoy life!

Before we left Lone Pine I found this information, so everone should know now where to find me!

After this we hadn't enough. We went on to the Botanical Garden, which is not big but nice:


Now at last we went for food and found a great Indian restaurant. Of course I went for hot food. It was soo delicious. On South Bank later we had ice cream and beer. I felt sick. Not only because of all this food. I catched a sunstroke and heavy headache. So I went home and slept for more than 12 hours. I was ready for the next adventure!
P.S. The first impression of christmas in Down Under:

on the roofs

There we go. Almost two weeks are over now. Summary: AUSTRALIA IS GREAT!!!

Just some pics:

The view from our institute 6th level, where my office is!

And this the view to Brisbane from the 7th level at our building.


When I went home I decided to give it a try to wash my clothes. A flatemate showed me where the washing maschine is. And? It is on the roof!! Seriously! Here are the proofs, the nice view over Brisbane and the washing maschine. Must be a model from the good old days! Amazing!!








... to be continued

The Job - part 2 and some adds

Ok, too many people asked me already what I am actually doing. Here and now I will try my best to explain it. Have a look at the protein database LOCATE . This database stores proteins of the organism Mus musculus (better known as mouse!) and can represent a lot of additional information, like transcription, location and other links. My task is it now to create a similar database but for the organism Homo sapiens (better known as human!). Behind this task are many little steps. First I have to check what kind of data I could use avoiding too many redundancy. I have to learn some tools, like Memo. I do some perl programming as well.
The first troubles I had was to get all the accounts to the machines I need. Let me forget about it, I have them all now and I can work at least. I am happy with it. Now I can handle 40.000 protein sequences and ca. 130.000 cDNAs (coding DNA sequences). I started one perlscript this morning and it wasn't finished when I left. I just hope that the power cut this evening didn't harm this process. Otherwise I have to start it tomorrow again. I aim for the next week to fill the database with all required data. That is a lot of puzzling work but I really do enjoy it!

I mentioned the power cut. Before sitting in the darkness of my room I decided to go skating along the river. At this suburb, Towoong, the power was ok. There is a great path with asphalt along the river to the city centre. I unfortunately forgot my camera (really sorry guys!). It was soooo great. First the skating, soooo relaxing. You know, just putting the hands on the back and then pushing the legs slowly right, left, right, left. The warm wind in your hair. Undescribable! Second, you should have seen Brisbane by night along the river. The path guides through the huge bridges and becomes a little bridge itself. What a view! That's really worth to see and to experience.

And finally some more pics. First our inimitable connection to the outside world! It works! ;)


Here three pics from our living room and the kitchen. Quite a lot of space. I like it.

The Job - part 1

I warn you: I am in a bad mood.

Still no own account for the computers. I am stuck here. I don't understand the data anymore. What's the hell I am doing here? One week for nothing! Therefore I cannot explain to you what I am suppose to do here. I am not sure anymore. I still think the whole project is interesting and doable, but just give me the right tools I need!

I think I will go for beer tonight!

The campus

Yes, since three days I am working on this beautiful campus. It is really nice and quite international. They even have a cricket field. (I still couldn't find one, who could explain me this game!) Yep, it is full of sport fields, e.g. basketball, net ball (what is it?), tennis and even a swimming pool. The following pics show you my daily walk to work:





Brisbane is actually quite hilly. It is even worse than you can see on the last pic. Now the entrance of my building. I like this palm trees!

On the way to deal with some administration stuff I took pics of some neighbour-institutes.