One day a couple of years back I went to visit a friend in his lab. I found him in a considerable amount of distress. He needed to get some data off a computer with no USB ports, internet connection or CD drive. The printer didn’t even work. All it had was a floppy drive. I grinned cunningly, fished around in my bag and produced a floppy, thus saving the day.
To this day, I refuse to give an explanation as to what that disk was doing in my bag.

I absolutely love floppy disks. I find their astute sturdiness reassuring. I love flipping the metal bit back and forth with my thumb. Metallic click click click snap. They do their job without the rainbow flashyness of a compact disk. Plus you could get them in a variety of translucent colours so you could stare inside and look at the mechanism. Oh and the noise the drive makes when it reads and writes makes me blither with ecstasy. OH AND ALSO ejecting the disk was so much fun, my school had a computer with an over zealous mechanism that would shoot them across the room.

When I was in primary school, I used to be the one going around in glee whenever any of the other children were having problems starting up their computers. “You’ve left the floppy in the drive, silly, it’s trying to boot from that. I doubt you could boot on 3 Paint files” I would say in a condescending tone. Oh what a little twerp I was.

I don’t like the 8 inch ones because they really are floppy. I always liked the oxymoronic nature of the name, besides they were a bit (read: a lot) before my time.
I have Windows 95 on 35 1.44 MB floppy disks. Oh what fun that was to install. Unfortunately, I seem be missing disk numbers 17, 26 and 29.

The number of times I’ve had to do an emergency boot with a floppy on a ‘modern’ computer is reason enough for why Sony should not stop manufacturing them in 2011.
In conclusion, I know how a floppy disk works. I do not know how a flash drive works. Ergo elk, the end.

I was an young student, venturing out in to the world for the first time. A red sock got mixed in with my white washing. Despite my best efforts, it is still slightly pink. The shade isn’t obvious, but it still has a My Little Pony aura about it.

Now I’m 22 and probably no more worldly-wise. However, I do now have a blog, which means it is only polite that I introduce myself.

I’m Katie Grape, working my way through a masters degree in Biochemistry. I live somewhere in the UK, but I am not going to tell you my exact grid coordinates lest you stalk me. I’ll save that vital information until we know each other a little better.

I am doing biochemistry because I have a manic thirst to find out how everything works.
I was enraged when they didn’t tell me until A level what DNA actually does. How does it “code for life”? The minute I left school and went to college they told me that it codes for proteins. If only they had told me that simple answer before! Of course the answer is actually a bit more complicated than that, but it was enough to satisfy me for a while.
My degree is answering all my questions quite satisfactorily, unfortunately it is provoking even more. This is a good thing though, it will keep me occupied for the rest of my life.

This year I did a project involving X-ray crystallography of a halophilic hydroxyacid dehydrogenase protein. It was simultaneously the hardest I have ever worked, and the most fun I have ever had. I’ll write all about that some other time.
My current project is a 5,000 word literature review on the evolution of protein folds. Again, I will ramble about (read: complain that I didn’t get to write about AFM) this later.

My main areas of interest are: PROTEINS, structure of. Oh my goodness, proteins are my life. Kinetics and mathsy physicsy stuff. Various methods of “visualising” little tiny molecules. Photosynthesis.
I’ve also done some modules on immunology, viruses, autoimmune disease. I know everything there is to know about the history of influenza pandemics. I’m not thinking of going in to the health field, but I thought I should keep my options open before I get completely lost in the biophysics universe.

I hate bacteria as they don’t always do what I tell them to, pesky things. I don’t like genetics either, which is a shame because I’m quite good at it.

I have one year left of my masters. Hopefully after that I’ll be doing a PhD. I want to stay in academic research and share my wisdom with little students like I was/am. If someone will give me a job to write humorous literature reviews, or in fact any type of amusing science writing, I will marry them. Twice.

Ooh look at me, aren’t I pretentious? I have a science blog. I shall use it to show to the world how clever my face is.

At the same time, I shall make it my duty that the ramblings contained here are not boring, but exceedingly frabjous. My posts shall gyre and gimble in the wabe like kittens.

Now I must cease to exist because I am trying to write my dissertation. More on that story later.