Der Bioinformatiker

just wanted to inform anyone who is still reading this, that I finally recieved the money for the first two months.
I’m really happy now

VoipBuster (yeah, the ones with the free calls) updated the client to allow free P2P communication as well. It seems like all the companies take the good ideas of the competition and work them into their own clients. I still hope that someone will offer one client to rule them all soon.

Today, we went to Hannover to visit the “Biotechnica 2005”.
We were a group of 19 students from Hagenberg. Our train left yesterday at 10:45pm, a night train that went directly to Hannover. We arrived at 06:40am and had breakfast at the bistro directly at the train station. Then we caught our connection train to the fair grounds, which are two stations from the centre.
Once we left the train station there we were greeted by some shuttle buses which took us directly to the halls where the fair was taking place. We got there at about 08:30am and checked in and bought our tickets. The fair opened at 09:00am, and we were one of the first visitors to pass the ticket checks. At first it was a bit frustrating, because most of the booths were still finishing their decorations and fixing stuff.
We started to stroll around and to look for firms which could be of interest to us. Many companies worked on hardware and machines for working with micro arrays or micro titer plates, and we had a hard time finding companies which focused on software development. But at least I found some interesting information concerning the Affymetrix scanner I’m supposed to work with in my internship. I got some tips and will try to get the recommended software to work. I hope this will satisfy the requirements, as it looks like there is already enough software around, most of it would even be freely available to the Blutzentrale, because they bought the scanner.
Later on we started to do what all the people visiting fairs do: collecting the stuff they give away for free. You can see some pictures of the stuff I got on the webcam. Some of my colleagues were either more successful or more cheeky, because they got more stuff than me, some of them even got some cool stuff, for example a t-shirt saying “rna – the other nucleic acid” (yeah, kind of an “insider” joke) and some nice posters.
I talked to some interesting companies and got some contacts, which could be useful for some of us. One of those companies was the Fraunhofer Institute, which presented a low cost micro array scanner, in some ways similar to the machine developed by the UAR, although they use a totally different method to take the picture. They also have a department which works in the field of bioinformatics, so we’ll take a look if they are interested in cooperating or accepting interns.
Now we are on our way back to Linz (we have to change trains 3 times – in Nürnberg, Passau and in Wels). The conductor on the last train was really strange, we suspected him to be a bit drunk. He even had the wrong date on his stamp:

Yesterday, Elke and I went to the Feuerkogel for a bit of hiking and enjoying the nice warm days. It was really nice there, even though the paths are quite smoothe and not challenging anough for my taste.
I’ll put some photos in the gallery soon.
In the evenning, we went to the restaurant Akakiko for some — no, not sushi! Surprise there! — we had Chili-Sake (Salmon on sweet-chili sauce) and Kamo-Terriyaki (Duck with Terriyaki-sauce). It was a nice evening.

I also finished reading Thud!, the new Discworld novel by Terry Pratchett. Although it’s not as good as “The Fifth Elephant”, just to name one, I quite enjoyed reading it. Did you know, by the way, that one of the last books, “Monstrous Regiment”, was translated to German as “Weiberregiment”, which is one hell of a spoiler. If anyone ever asks me again why I like to read books in the original language, that will be my answer…

Totally incoherent things:

Well, nothing really new. Still haven’t seen a cent for my work.

I updated the whole page a bit, take a look yourself and tell me what you think: bioinformatiker.at. I also played around a bit with my old webcam and was surprised to find that there still are working drivers for WinXP. So I set up a small page and dubbed it H-nes’ eye. Usually you’ll see the view from the window of my room in Linz, but perhaps I will take it with me when I’m around and about.