MistarOblivion

Robert's Xanga Page is up, and along with it, his photobucket site, with tons of great pictures. Above is a great one our delicious Okonamiyaki dinner last Friday, which was detailed a few blog posts back.


Going with the food theme, Wednesday night we went to a conveyor belt sushi place. It's a very unique experience. Everything just sort of floats by on the conveyor belt, and you grab whatever looks good. If you are impatient and want to order something by hand, there's a little intercom at the side. Then when you're done you press another button and the server comes to count up your plates. I ate quite a lot of sushi, and I tried some very interesting stuff - raw baby squid and raw octopus. The picture above is the squid. Looks interesting eh? Well, it was delicious - surprisingly soft and sweet. So far, discarding my weird-food apprehensions has paid off in spades. The meal itself was cheap too, only 100 yen (less than $1) a plate! As you can see, there were quite a few plates at the end. We finished it off with some flan, which interestingly is the only mexican cuisine I can find here. I saw some avocados at the store, so I was thinking guacamole, but apparently they don't sell tortilla chips here. Shame, Shame.

Tonight is the welcome party, and Shimojo-sensee (the head honcho at the Cyber Media Center) offered to introduce us to some different types of sake. That should be interesting. We'll also be partying with some Dutch students who are also doing a project here as well. We're the guests of honor, so that's rather exciting.

Laundry last night was quite an ordeal. It was mostly trial and error, as we couldn't read the instructions or the buttons. The washing went mostly fine, but the dryer didn't do it's job after half an hour and 100 yen. I put in another 100, and still, my clothes were soaking wet. So I put hung them up to dry in my little bathroom, and turned on the dryer switch. They were still a mite damp this morning, so hopefully they'll be done when I get back tonight after the party, so I can use my shower.

If you've seen my flickr photostream then you've already seen all the pictures of my apartment and read the captions. I'm not going to bother explaining it all again here, but definitely check them out - they're all tagged 'apartment' - if you haven't yet.

I haven't said much about work so far, because I can't say much without it sounding very technical and boring. Marshall just sent me a neat picture of our molecular surface mapping software in action though, so I figure I'll explain a bit. Our goal is to simulate molecular interaction between proteins (like the one in orange to the left) and potential drugs. Proteins perform all the functions in your body - they're like little molecular machines. The white thing in the middle is a ligand - it interacts with the protein. Ligands usually activate/deactivate proteins, and so finding out how ligands fit into the protein's 3D structure will help us develop drugs to change how they function. The blue dots approximate the surface of the protein, defined by the Van Der Waal radii of its atoms. The program we are using just tries to fit the ligand into the protein as best as possible, taking into account this surface, as well as chemical complimentarity and electric charge. These are pretty big molecules, and we're trying to test ligand in a high-throughput manner (like 100,000+ ligands at once) so we get to use the supercomputers here at Osaka University to perform the calculations. It sounds exciting, but it pretty much involves us all sitting at these desks being frustrated by compiler errors all day. Still, its fun when things work.

That's more than enough for now. Here's to hoping the party goes well tonight. I'll post the details here this weekend, along with anything else we do. Cathy told us she's never seen a baseball game, so that might be an adventure there....