Modesto Day Trip

Playing with Photosynth

Photosynth is another one of those quirky side projects by Microsoft. This program allows people to easily create 360° panoramas. They recently created an app for iOS that utilizes the gyroscope features to precisely piece pictures together. As you can see from my sample below, however, it is far from perfect. Still a neat toy to play with though.

Niles Canyon Railway

Intern Lunch & Baseball Game

On Wednesday, the interns were all given the day off and go to SF for lunch and the see the Giants game. How cool is that!

After a (hilarious/sad) episode in which our HR person managed to lose our game tickets in her own car, we took Bart over to SF to have lunch at the Gordon Biersch Brewery Restaurant. The food there was terrific, especially the starter dishes. I'm sure everyone enjoyed their "chocolate cake" as well. After that we walked over to Momo's across the street from AT&T park. Being only 20, I was sadly not having any fun hanging out at a bar where everyone else was drunk and having a good time. Finally, we entered the stadium. Being the first time at AT&T park, I was amazed how wonderfully designed the building was. Not only was it functionally well designed, but it was very aesthetically pleasing. Unlike the cruddy stadiums like the coliseum, I actually WANTED to walk around and explore the place. Everywhere you go there was a great view of the field so you would never miss a moment of the game. During my little excursion, I was also lucky to see a splash hit as it went in the water! On average only about 5 balls are ever hit out of the park and into the Cove, so I was really fortunate to see it happen in person! When I actually sat at my seat, the view wasn't so great. We got bleacher seats that were pretty high up (near where the giant Coke bottle was), so it was nearly impossible to see what was going on...unless you were watching it on the ridiculously huge HD display. If I could hook that screen up to my computer, it would be the greatest gaming setup in the world.

During the 8th inning, the Giants were up 7-9. People were getting tired of sitting out in the sun, so we decided to head back early. What a huge mistake that was. The game went into extra innings shortly after we left. Fortunately, the Giants held on to win 9-10.

On the way home on Bart, everyone was passed out except me. Overall, it was a great experience and I had a lot of fun. Interestingly, the most fun/surprising part was being able to spend time with my coworkers and see how everyone acts outside of a work environment. It turns out that HR people are a lot less serious (and much more fun) when not at work.

Failure is Always an Option

Over the past week, my group has been working meticulously trying to finish our project. Unfortunately, some problems with our lab equipment caused our experiments to fail. Among the four people in our group, I was the only person who managed to get a successful result, and even then my data was very inconsistent.

This made me realize how much I am truly on the cutting edge of the field. Unlike in lab at school, failure is always an option and is almost expected to happen. Because the scope of our work is so microscopic, there are a wide range of variables that can affect our results from bad reagents to instrument failure.

However, failure is not always a bad thing. If everything worked perfectly without any problems, they wouldn't need some of the brightest minds in the world to do the work would they? Furthermore, sometimes the unexpected outcomes that causes and experiment to fail can provide new discoveries. For example, many scientific discoveries such as penicillin and Teflon were all discovered on accident due to a failed experiment. It's stuff like this that makes science such an interesting field in my opinion. You never know what's going to happen to your experiment and you're not going to get punished for failure because it's all part of the scientific process.