After several years of sitting on a dusty miniDV tape, I finally got round to uploading this short film made for the Mothra Student Film Festival at my old uni back in 2004. I made a bunch of short films for this festival, but this is definitely my favourite. Based on an idea spawned one drunken night many years ago, it was written by myself and a couple of good friends, and filmed around the uni campus over the space of about a day.
Inspired by the live thesis efforts of Attila at Pimm which I have been following recently, I’ve decided to go ahead and post an online version of my own MSc thesis on the identification of stem-like cells in the thymus of mice lacking tumour supressor gene p53.
One of my very first posts was about putting a thesis together into a single PDF file, so hopefully this provides a physical illustration of the end result.
As an aside, chances are a thesis PDF is going to be friggin massive (mine was >300Mb), so I thought I would briefly mention a further nifty programme for PDF editing on a mac that converted my mofo of a thesis into a more manageable size for distribution.
PDF Compress is a simple, fast and easy to use programme that converts big bulky PDFs into much smaller files, without excessive loss of resolution, in one easy step. My original 300Mb thesis PDF was downsized into a much sleeker 1.3 Mb PDF that is easily sendable or uploadable.
While the programme is only a trial version, you can cheekily request further trial licenses when the original one runs out. Although if you’ll be using it regularly I’d suggest buying the license (around US$35).
Kapai.
Have had some quality family time in recent weeks, with Mum and Dad having flown over from NZ for a visit. Needless to say, I was completely spoiled: presents from home (mostly Marmite), lots of eating out, and 4 nights up in the highlands courtesy of Dad’s credit card.
Was also quite fun showing them around Edinburgh and taking them on a tour around campus. A particular highlight (for me…at least) was showing them my lab and our fancy new SOLEXA DNA sequencing machine. Although trying to explain how it works and why it is so awesome over dinner that night was a bit more challenging.
So in between dragging them around all the tourist sites in Edinburgh and showing Dad the finer points of british ales I have had little time to read anything going on in the world of science and thus have had a brief hiatus from blogging. But now I’m back, in all my intermittent and semi-regular blogtastic glory.
