Last day of TA work for Fall Semester

Today was the last day of TA responsibilities for the Genetics Lab for me. The whole thing's been a really interesting experience. The last lab session with students was yesterday, and today I went in to sort through the genetic samples that were left over, ran the DNA off the last of the gels, and just cleaned the lab in general. The Professor says that there might be a shortage of lab classes next semester, but hopefully I will be able to get another TA position for the Spring.
The lab itself was a lot of work for the students. In addition to the three long term experiments that the professor had designed for them, they also had to design their own fourth experiment. And in addition to the regular assignments of maintaining a lab notebook, and writing lab reports, they also had to prepare a poster presentation of their group designed experimental results, and then each of the two lab sections had a Poster Session. The first lab section only had three groups, so they just presented one at a time to the class. The second lab section had eleven groups. They ended up doing the session in the hallway, and each group ended up presenting to the professor, and then rotated to at least two different selections of other groups. Some of the other professors and workers in the department also attended this micro-Poster Session. I'd say that these students had their work cut out for them, but that now, after all of that, they're really much more prepared than the average biology student at other Universities.

Wascally Wabbit

After the debacle with GMAC, I've been fortunate enough to get a car that I like, the VW Rabbit. The Rabbit is a model that first got started in the '70s, I beleive. After a while VW changed the name to "Golf", and I think that there was a version of the Golf called the "GTI". Now they've dropped the "Golf" moniquer and have gone back to calling it the Rabbit. I love it. It get good gas mileage and has lots of luggage space inside, since its a hatchback. On Black Friday after Thanksgiving, we went out and picked up a new TV at 5 in the morning, to take advantage of the wildly reduced prices. It fit into the Rabbit with no problems at all, plenty of room to spare. Its an automatic transmission, I have no idea how to drive a manual transmission. In addition to regular automatic, it has two other modes. A "Sport" mode, where the gears kick in at higher RPMs, and a "Triptronic" mode. Triptronic is a type of transmission, developed by Porsche, that allows you to Upshift and Downshift through the gears of the transmission, no clutch action required. If you try to shift down into a gear that would over-rev the engine, the computer won't permit it. In some descriptions of Triptronic, its claimed that when the RPM are lower, the computer will remember that your command and then down shift. However I've played around with it, and it doesn't seem like the VW Triptronic at least will do that. It will also downshift on its own if the engine's RPM fall very low.

The car has a bouncier ride than I am used to. I've noticed that most companies are claiming that this is a 'sportier' ride. That the American public is moving away from the old feels of some cars, where the smooth ride was important, and are becoming more accepting of the more European style 'sporty' rides. I had an old Mercury Grand Marquis, and driving it was like cruising along on a boat. Now, apparently, everyone wants to feel every bump and joint in the road. Takes a bit of getting used to, at first I thought something was wrong with the suspension!